Main menu

Tag Archives: Markus Lupertz

Post navigation

In addition to being an artist, Markus Lüpertz was a poet. Throughout the exhibition, share your Lüpertz-inspired poems with us to win prizes. Every other week, we’ll issue a new poetry challenge based on images or themes in the exhibition for fresh inspiration and chances to win.

THIS WEEK’S CHALLENGE:
Rather than chronologically, the Markus Lüpertz exhibition is organized in an optical order (more on this in a previous blog post). Write a short poem describing your response to the way Lüpertz’s works are displayed and arranged in this installation.

TO ENTER: Leave your poem in the comments here, or share on social media with #LupertzPoem. We’ll select winners on Friday, September 1.

**UPDATE: The winning poem was submitted by Rebecca B:

Walking into a room
A city
A town
A crowd
We do not simply
Walk
Into the present moment
With painted past
And indistinct future
We enter a space
Filled with
Light
Color
Voices
Feelings.
Because we enter
Through a doorway
Does not mean
We should expect
A way
We have already felt
We have already faced.

In addition to being an artist, Markus Lüpertz was a poet. Throughout the exhibition, share your Lüpertz-inspired poems with us to win prizes. Every other week, we’ll issue a new poetry challenge based on images or themes in the exhibition for fresh inspiration and chances to win.

THIS WEEK’S CHALLENGE:
Create a haiku inspired by the colors and shapes in Markus Lüpertz’s Baumstamm Abwaerts Dithyrambisch (Tree Trunk Down—Dithyrambic). A traditional haiku is a three-line poem with seventeen syllables, written in a 5/7/5 syllable count.

THIS WEEK’S PRIZE: Four anytime tickets to The Phillips Collection

TO ENTER: Leave your poem in the comments here, or share on social media with #LupertzPoem. We’ll select winners on Friday, August 18.

**UPDATE: The winning poem was submitted by Katherine Rutsala:

So quartered and drawn
the green golden tree trunk flies.
The forgiving sky.

The Cold War and the global divide between the Capitalist West and the Socialist East led to the politicization of both abstraction and realism. In New York, the new art capital of the postwar era, Abstract Expressionism was cast as a symbol of freedom and individualism that was meant to contrast with the oppressive, restrictive realism of soviet and socialist art. Often covertly through the CIA, the US Government began supporting exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism abroad and helped fund magazines and support critics who promoted American art. In the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, the art policy of Socialist Realism—realist art that heroized workers and depicted the progress of the socialist utopia—was presented as the art of the people and was pitted against the imperialistic capitalist West whose art of abstraction was derided as indulgent and bourgeois. Thus, both abstraction and realism were politicized in the Cold War, and Germany—literally split between Socialist East and Capitalist West—embodied this divide.

From this standpoint, Markus Lüpertz’s mix of abstract and representational imagery becomes both more understandable and more engaging. Negotiating between these two positions, Lüpertz’s insistence that the “object is not important” can be understood as a kind of refusal of both extremes of this polarized world. While the human body, or the appearance of helmets or knives inevitably engages German history, Lüpertz often situates these forms within a kind of unknowable, surrealistic setting that keeps them from ever satisfying the desire to “understand.”